1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally directed to the field of automated document processing.
2. Background
In the current Information Age, documents are being produced at a rate that far exceeds an individual's ability to process them. For many reasons, however, it is important that these documents be analyzed and/or organized into a conceptually coherent structure. For example, the documents may be of military or economic significance. Failure to analyze and/or organize such documents could be detrimental to national security, could lead to economic loss, or both. As a result, classification systems have been developed to help analyze and/or organize the vast amount of documents that are continually produced. Such classification systems are typically based on a pre-determined classification scheme.
However, the challenge of analyzing the large amounts of information contained in these documents is multiplied by a variety of circumstances, locations and changing identities among the entities involved. Consequently, it is not feasible to build a pre-determined classification scheme capable of meeting all current needs. Constant adaptation is required to accommodate new information as it becomes available. A pre-determined classification scheme does not allow for such adaptation.
Given the foregoing, what is needed then is an automated classification system for detecting new patterns and for providing a specific and understandable organization of input information. Such an automated classification system should learn patterns in an unsupervised fashion and organize its knowledge in a comprehensive way.